Haifux lectures for fun and profit

Haifux has been hosting quality lectures by the finest free software and Linux developers in Israel since 1999. If there's an interesting topic you'd like to give a lecture on, we would like to hear!

Contact the haifux mailing list to discuss potential future lectures. We also take lecture requests...

A Haifux lecture is at most two hours long, including a 10 minute break. If the subject cannot be covered in sufficient detail in one meeting, several meetings can be dedicated to it.

A Haifux lecture is open to the public and free of charge. An invitation to the lecture is sent to haifux@haifux.org mailing list, as well as to linux-il@linux.org.il mailing list.

Presentation aids include a projector, a computer which is connected to the internet, and the possibility to connect a laptop. A whiteboard is also available. If you need a laptop running Linux, one of the club members will be happy to volunteer it.

The lecture hall is located inside the Technion, which limits car access to it. If you need a car permit, please email you car number, your name and ID number to webmaster@haifux.org at least two days in advance.

Slide Guidelines

• Lecturers are encouraged to publish their lecture slides several days in advance.
• Lecturers are encouraged to supply an abstract (of about two sentences).
• We do request that the slides be in an open format e.g. html, ps or pdf. OpenOffice.org formats areacceptable, but more portable formats are prefered (i.e., such formats that have a browser on most computers).
• Lecturers are also encouraged to publish the source for the lecture slides (this request holds in the case of pdf slides - for example the *.tex source files).
• When links are mentioned in the slides, please write the target of the link such that it will be visible to the audience, as well as printable. This is a bad example for a link. http://www.example.com is a good example for a link.
• Please create at least an additional version of the slides, which is easily printable. For example, a single html file. Remember that many people wish to study the slides before the lecture.

Creating slides in an HTML format

• Standard html, which can be created by simple text editors such as vi or XEmacs, or by html composers such as Mozilla Composer or sweb from the OpenOffice package. An example can be seen in lecture 62.
• Quad-Pres, which stands for "Quick and Dirty Presentations" and is a Perl and Web Meta Language based framework, written by Shlomi Fish. An example can be found here.

Creating slides in an open format using LaTeX

• Use LaTeX to generate a DVI file, convert it to postscript using a driver (e.g. dvips), and convert the result to PDF using ps2pdf.

  latex *.tex
dvips -Ppdf -G0 *.dvi -o
ps2pdf *.ps

  Dvips supports EPS graphics, but if you include the same eps picture several times, it will get copied again and again into the postscript file. Dvips supports the package pstricks. Dvips does not support png and jpg images; to embed such files you have to convert them to eps, for example: pngtopnm picture.png | pnmtoeps. Converting png to eps using gimp results in very large files.
• Use PDFLaTeX to create PDF files directly from LaTeX sources. PDFLaTeX allows embedding of PNG and JPG images in the PDF file (it includes them once, even if they are used several times in the document), but does not support importing EPS graphics, nor the package pstricks. EPS graphics can be converted to PDF for inclusion, using the script epstopdf; a substitute for pstricks is pdftricks.

slides

A class for creating presentation slides, part of the basic LaTeX distribution. Provides basic functionality, including overlays. Under the old LaTeX 2.09 it had to be run using a separate program, SliTeX

seminar

Provides more functionality than the slides class. Supports animated transitions between slides. An example of the input and output of seminar can be seen in lecture 72.

prosper

A class intended to create PDF slides with an appearance similar to certain commercial presentation software. Support for animated transitions between slides is more straightforward than with seminar, but Hebrew support is more difficult because of the class's heavy reliance on PostScript. The class depends on the package pstricks, so it doesn't work with PDFLaTeX. Here's a short tutorial; an example of the input and output can be seen in lecture 63.

beamer

Similar in concept to prosper, but designed to work with PDFLaTeX.

Creating slides in an open format Using Graphical Presentation Tools (WYSIWYG)

• simpress from the Open Office package. A template for those who wish to use Open Office can be found here.
• LyX creates TeX files using a very convinient interface.
• kpresenter from the koffice package.

Creating slides in an open format Using non-Graphical Presentation tools

• Perl-Point. This link is a lecture about Perl-Point, written in Perl-Point, which includes the source. Perl-Point can create both LaTex and HTML output.
• DocBook contains a slide presentor that can translate DocBook/XML into a multitude of formats: HTML, TeX, Word RTF, etc.
• MagicPoint. Creates big postscript files, and HTML files without any markups or big GIFs. An example of the input and output can be seen in lecture 44.